


No Crystal Stair

by FyrMaiden



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, Depression, Gen, Overdose (as canon), Past Kent Parson/Jack Zimmermann
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2016-10-08
Packaged: 2018-08-20 06:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8239628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: Alicia just wants Jack to find happiness, whatever it takes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [Mother To Son](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47559) by Langston Hughes.

i. _Midgets, or, Jack is born, he grows up._

Alicia Zimmermann is not a natural on skates. 

When they’d first got married, Bob had tried to teach her. He’d been at home then, in Montreal, and he’d had all of the patience in the world with her wobbling around and clinging to his arms. He was good with her, and she’d slowly become proficient enough to not have to cling to his hand every time they went out, good enough to be able to stand without shaking and to let go of the edge, and not quite good enough to not physically wince whenever he came to a skidding halt in front of her so that ice sprayed her boots and calves and made her laugh that wide, open mouthed laugh that had made him fall in love with her to start with.

Over the years, she has improved a little, but she’s not a natural. Not in the same way she’s a natural in front of a camera (and, to some extent, behind one). It doesn’t come to her as easily as walking in her skyscraper heels does, a feat that Bob finds inordinately impressive in and of itself, and which she blows off a little every time.

“You stand on knife blades on a tractionless surface,” she says, and his eyebrows pull in a little as he shakes his head.

“No,” he disagrees. “If I’m just standing, I’m doing it wrong.”

And again, she laughs that honest laugh he loves, and being with him is easy.

 

They’re living in Pittsburgh when their son is born. Alicia takes a short break whilst she’s pregnant, and then works hard to get back in shape. They’ve discussed his name at length, and they settle on Jack as an ideal compromise between their family and cultural identities. (Jacques and Laurent for two of Bob’s great-grandfathers, and Jack, like one of her grandfathers.) When the season is over, they move back to Montreal, and that’s where Alicia and Jack primarily stay. (Bob is still playing out of Pittsburgh for a little while, and Alicia travels south to see him occasionally). 

She remembers clearly the first time Bob took Jack out on the ice. Jack could barely walk but he’d actually squealed with happiness, his large solemn eyes full of delight and almost the same colour as the blue line beneath his scrabbling, kicking feet. Alicia had leant against the boards and taken pictures of them, Bob bent over, holding Jack’s elbows as he scoots him along. When Jack gets tired, Bob hauls him onto his hip and brings him back to Alicia. Jack is flushed and sleepy, but even tired, his smile is genuine and she knows one thing for absolute certain: she has to get better, because this is going to matter. The cold still of the ice speaks to Jack in ways he doesn’t understand yet, and she doesn’t want to miss any of it because she doesn’t speak the language.

Bob spends the season in Pennsylvania, or in Pennsylvania and various hotels around the country. Alicia takes Jack with her to watch him when he’s in Montreal, and she takes additional skating lessons when he’s away. It’s good for her core, keeps her in shape, and she can bring Jack with her and watch as he outstrips her easily, pads covering almost all of his chubby little body. Even when she left the ice to get herself hot chocolate or tea, he would stay out on the ice, and - when he’s 5 - he starts midget hockey. For a child who can be otherwise so solemn, he comes alive beneath his pads and helmet. His eyes might be the colour of hers, but watching him skate, he’s undeniably Bob Zimmermann’s son.

 

ii. _Major Juniors, or, First there was hockey and then there was Parse._

Jack is drafted into the QMJHL when he’s 16, and for the first time, Alicia wishes he’d been more proficient at lacrosse, or even soccer. For the first time, the name on his shoulders is a palpable, tangible weight. It’s a lot for a nervous, anxious teenager, suddenly billeted away for more than half the year. She watches him when she can, and she worries. He’s not like his dad. As charismatic as he can be on the ice, off of it is a different matter. He’s cautious, self-aware. His speech is monotone, and she knows that it’s because it’s the only way he knows to flatten his accent in English, to assimilate. He looks scared a lot of the time, unless he’s with the blond boy who plays on his line. When he’s with him, Jack lets himself disappear, let’s the other boy take the lead. 

Alicia remembers what it was like to be 17 and miles from home. She remembers what it was like to be a teenager in a competitive environment, how simultaneously easy and impossibly hard it had been to find companionship and someone she could confide in. She remembers the girl she’d shared a room and, later, a bed with. Her name was Summer and her hair was like fall leaves and Alicia had loved her for a time, until it had been time for them to both move on. They’d shared everything from toothpaste to lipstick to closely held secrets, and it had made the loneliness of living away bearable. She sees that in Jack’s soft smile, and the way he looks at the boy, and she hopes with her whole heart that Kent makes him happy.

Jack brings Kent home, to Montreal, when the season is over. They pad up and knock pucks at one another, and Kent checks him with his whole body, crowding Jack against the boards until they’re both breathless and laughing. It doesn’t matter, away from the flashbulbs and the whispers, what they do to and with one another. Jack is as carefree as she’s seen him since the minors, and if Kent is part of that, then she will put her worries aside and pray for the world to be kind to them.

When Kent goes home, as he inevitably must, Alicia puts on her own skates and meets Jack halfway. He’s quieter, more somber, and she’s taken him to enough doctor’s appointments over the years to know a crash when she sees one. He tries, though. He smiles at her, small and damaged, even as he grows - year by year - physically more like Bob. His shoulders are broader, and the fat he carried as a child gives way to a 6’ wall of growing muscle. The promise in his ice blue eyes and his cheekbones settles with puberty, and Alicia wants to send snotty emails to every publication that ever called a child ugly, but she mostly just worries about him.

“You need a haircut,” she smiles, and he runs a large hand through the unruly tangle of his hair, frowning slightly. Sure, she thinks. He’s bigger, but inside, he’s still her little boy. He’s still the same child. (And he is a child, for all that he’s a little taller than her, and that he shaves now. He’s still the anxious, nervous kid, watching her for social cues from behind her legs. He doesn’t process facial expressions easily, and he doesn’t have a lot of patience for things that don’t immediately go his way, or the way he planned them, and he internalises mistakes in a way she wishes she could help him stop doing, but he’s still her child and she still feels she understands him.) 

“Sorry,” he says, and she sighs, shakes her own head a little, and watches as he pulls a beanie down over his chilled ears so that only the longest tufts of hair are visible. 

“Who is Kent?” she asks him softly, skating with him. He slows down for her, but the question makes him stop entirely, freezing him in place. There’s a pink to his cheeks that would be sweet if it weren’t for the terror in his eyes, and when he answers, it’s in the French he’s used to speaking here, on his own ice.

“Just a friend, maman,” he says, and leaves the rink completely.

He hides so much, and so well, and she doesn’t know how much he’s struggling. She hopes he’ll learn he can talk to her as she watches him remove his skates, wiping them down before putting them away carefully. 

She doesn’t expect it to be him almost dying that prompts it.

 

iii. _Aftermath, or, The losses we learn to live with._

When Jack comes home, he doesn’t want to skate. At first, he avoids the ice altogether. He spends his time alone with his camera for a while, though he doesn’t seem inclined to share the pictures that he takes. When he’s not outside with his camera, he’s in his room with his laptop, whiling away hours with documentaries that she knows he’s seen before. Alicia worries and tries not to. He’s getting better. He’ll tell her if he needs something.

Right?

But the days pass slowly (and sometimes all at once) and the closest she sees him get is him putting his duffle with his skates in in the back of his truck. He’s home too quickly to have got much further than maybe changing into them, though. He doesn’t say much, only takes his bag and his misery back up the stairs and sleeps.

She finds him, occasionally, leaning against the barrier of their own rink, staring out across the ice.

“You don’t have to go back out, Jack,” she says softly, and he startles and glances back at her. He’s grown up so much. His eyes are heavy and full of the words he doesn’t know how to say, and his mouth sets in a firm line, severe and miserable. He turns a corner up in a rye smile just for her, though.

“I know,” he says, his voice rough from disuse. “I miss it, though. I don’t know how-” 

His English is slow and weighted, like each word is pulling up roots. She wants to hold him like she did when he was small and unlikely, when he could bury his face against her and she could protect him from a world that wanted far too much of a child. He’s taller than her now, though, and wider, and she doesn’t know if he’d appreciate the gesture. He’s not been good with touch since he got home. 

His shoulders drop, though, and then his head, and his bangs fall forward over his eyes, and she rests her hand on his shoulder lightly enough that he can pull away if he wants to. He doesn’t. He lets her reel him in and wrap her arms around him, and even his French is rocky - miserable and disjointed around the lump in his throat - as he tries not to cry.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, and she doesn’t even try to respond in kind. Her baby is hurting, and she comforts him the best way she can.

“There’s no timeline, Jack,” she says, and he nods his head against her shoulder. Her fingers ghost over his hair, and his fingers tangle in the wool of her sweater. So much pressure, and he’s still so young. He’s only just 18. He’s doing better, but he’s not okay. “Your dad and I just want you to be safe. Healthy.”

His eyes are red when he pulls away, but they’re remarkably dry. “I’m sorry,” he says for the hundredth time since he woke up, and looks the most like the 16 year old who’d left Montreal for Rimouski that he has in a long time. 

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she shakes her head. Her hair brushes her jaw, and Jack reaches to touch it. She wonders if he was like this with Kent and holds herself still. Those big hands are gentle, and his smile is sweet. “We don’t expect you to go back,” she says, when he looks like he’s finished, and he blinks and his eyes go curiously dead.

“I can’t - I can’t never get back out there,” he says. “I can’t let this - me, all of this - I can’t.”

He falters and pauses, and his hands ball into fists as he stares at the floor. “I want to play. I know I can play. Just. Maybe not yet?”

He speaks in bursts, each thought slow but the sentences rapid. She wishes Bob were here with them, to draw these thoughts out better. To really communicate with him about hockey, and how much they would rather have Jack, their son, than Jack, NHL rookie. But Bob’s not there, and Jack is, and he’s staring back out over the ice, and she hopes, one day, maybe soon, that he’ll be able to put his skates back on and find that synergy he’s had since he was small.

(And he does. He slopes down the stairs in his socks early one morning, skates in his hands. “Come with me?” he asks her, his voice startling in the vast quiet of their kitchen. She puts down her mug and her pen, and pushes herself to her feet. 

“Of course,” she says, her French shaking with her voice, and she feels her heart soar as Jack finds his patience and coaches her through a few easy steps. He teaches her to skate in English, laughing easily when they wipe out, worrying about her old bones on the hard of the ice, and he talks about the Q in French, because it's easier for him to say that way. Easier to talk about Kent, and the pressure they were under.

“Did you love him?” she asks, not for the first time. She asks in English. She expects Jack to close off, like he usually does. He skates away from her for a moment, a frown creasing his brow. He looks the least like Bob when he scowls like that. He stops half a rink away and looks back. His skin is pale in the cold. When his voice comes, it comes in French, clear and unflappable. 

“I don't know,” he says. “We had no basis for comparison. If I had to choose Kent or hockey, it would have been hockey.”

It's sad, she realises. The things he's learned not to let himself have because of hockey. All for that to be on hold as well.)

 

iv. _2009, or, Kent goes first and Jack doesn’t watch._

She and Bob watch the draft together that year. Kent Parson goes first, selected by the Las Vegas Aces. Bob grips her hand so hard it almost hurts. Jack should be up there. This should be his year. He's in the press regardless of his absence. There’ so much talk about his drug problem, about what his overdose was. There's sensationalism (it wasn’t hard drugs; he overdosed on his anxiety medication), speculation he was trying to kill himself (Jack insists he just wanted his hands to stop shaking), and both of them worry they were part of that. Alicia tries to catch Kent’s gaze, but it slides away from her when she manages it. He's cute, she thinks. Small. So young, though she remembers he's a little older than Jack is. They're barely more than boys, and they're carrying the weight of the future upon them. 

Jack isn't there and he doesn't watch. He's nearly 19. He's busy learning to love hockey again, assistant coaching his own midget team. They don't need him to be a hockey prodigy. They just want to play their best game. Jack learns to laugh, and to love his game. And he learns to distance himself from the pressure. To talk, a little. To let people in. 

Alicia is on the ice with him when he says he thinks he'll extend his break. Go to college. Maybe Samwell, because their history program is good. And their hockey team. Maybe?

She won't tell him no. He's got one life, and his perception of their expectations almost cut it short. 

“That's great, Jack,” she says, and he offers her a smile that could outshine the sun.


End file.
